Astronauts prepare for lab
2008-03-14 22:45
Houston - Two US astronauts floated
out into open space on Thursday to get a section of Japan's
elaborate research laboratory ready for installation on the
International Space Station.
Four-time flier Richard Linnehan and his rookie partner
Garrett Reisman left the station's airlock around 20:30 EDT
to begin the first of five spacewalks planned
during shuttle Endeavour's 16-day mission.
The astronauts' first job is to remove protective thermal
covers from a Japanese-built equipment storage chamber that
flew into orbit in the shuttle's cargo bay.
The shuttle reached the station on Wednesday night.
'Hope' lab
The storage chamber, which contains computers and
experiment racks, is the first part of Japan's space
laboratory, known as Kibo, or "hope". The main part of the
Kibo lab, which is about the size of a double-decker bus, is
due to arrive at the space station in May.
An outdoor porch for exposing experiments to the vacuum of
space will follow in 2009.
The spacewalkers also plan to disconnect a power cable to
the module, clearing the way for Japanese astronaut Takao Doi,
stationed inside Endeavour, to use the shuttle's robot arm to
pluck the chamber from the cargo bay and twirl it into position
on the station's Harmony connecting node.
Linnehan and Reisman will then turn their attention to a
Canadian robot, named Dextre, that will add manual dexterity
and 30 feet of reach to the station's crane.
NASA and the Canadian Space Agency were working on a
software patch to bypass a problem that is preventing the $209m robot from tapping into the station's electrical
system.
"There's not a sense of great urgency," shuttle mission
management team chairperson LeRoy Cain told reporters. "We don't
have our hair on fire."
Dextre can go at least five days before the cold of space
becomes a problem, NASA's space station program manager Mike
Suffredini told reporters at Houston's Johnson Space Center.
About half of the five spacewalks planned during
Endeavour's 12-day stay at the station are dedicated to
building Dextre, which has never been assembled on the ground.
Made for space
With 3.4m-long arms and a mass of more than 1.5 tons,
the robot would topple in Earth's gravity.
"It comes up in nine different pieces," Reisman said in a
pre-flight interview. "We have to put him together."
NASA hopes to use the robot to help with detailed exterior
station maintenance, cutting down the amount of time astronauts
have to spend on risky spacewalks.
The Endeavour crew won't have to spend any extra time
surveying their ship for heat shield damage, managers decided
on Thursday. After analysing photographs taken by the space
station crew as Endeavour approached for docking, engineers
said the shuttle appeared in good shape for landing at the end
of its planned 16-day mission.
NASA implemented a series of in-flight inspections after
losing the shuttle Columbia and its crew in 2003 due to
undetected heat shield damage.